The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (10 page)

It was easy, she thought, with the skies filled with fire and angry monsters, to imagine the death of the Silver City was the work of the dragons, but that was wrong. The ruin wrought here had
come when men still rode on their backs.

Seven months before the Black Mausoleum

Dragons were quickly bored. No patience. That was the way of it as far as Skjorl knew. A dragon sniffed you out in some cave somewhere; you curled up deep and waited and waited
and eventually it found something better to do than sit outside wanting to eat you. Skjorl couldn’t say for sure because most of the dragons he’d ever seen had got in plenty of eating,
thank you very much, but that was the way he’d heard it.

Apparently the dragon from Bloodsalt had heard different.

He’d seen it enough times to recognise it before they even left, while he and Jasaan were still hiding, nursing their aches and pains and their stomach cramps and eating dried and salted
bits of Relk and washing him down with brackish river water. He’d seen it lots of times, flying out of the salt desert every day, gliding off, away along the Sapphire, coming back again in
the twilight. Hadn’t occurred to Skjorl that the dragon was looking for
him
though, not then. Time passed. The dragon flew away for longer. Didn’t come back for days sometimes,
but it still came back. Never got to see what colour it was beyond a black shape up in the sky, but there was the size of it, the sound of it, the shape and the beat of its wings. Always the same
dragon.

When they moved, they moved at night. Jasaan wasn’t going to be winning any prizes for his running or his climbing, that was for sure, but at least he could walk and keep walking for
hours. There was still pain there, Skjorl could see that, but still
some
bits of Jasaan were made of adamantine and he kept his hurt to himself. Skjorl’s hand wasn’t much use for
anything any more except gripping a shield or his axe – Dragon-blooded, he’d settled on calling her – but that was all he had ever asked of it anyway. Besides, the first days were
easy enough. They’d come this way before, when there had been more of them. Knew places they could shelter in the day, deep out of sight of the sky. No shortage of potions to keep their
thoughts hidden. Wasn’t much food to be had out in this part of the world, but there was enough. They’d already found out the hard way which roots and berries they could eat and which
they couldn’t, back when they’d had Vish and Jex and Kasern and Marran, and the others who hadn’t even made it as far as Bloodsalt.

As the days and the nights wore on, they started to pass the places where the last few of their company had fallen. Vellas, stung by a scorpion that had taken a shine to the shade inside his
boot for the day. Goyan, who’d eaten something he shouldn’t have and become too weak to march. Him they’d put out of his misery. Couldn’t leave him to die on his own.
Couldn’t take the risk some dragon might fly past and see him either, that he might not be careful enough, that he might give them away; but he was an Adamantine Man, so he took his fate like
he should have when they bled him out into the river. They’d weighted him down with stones like they had with all the others and given him to the water. Dragons wouldn’t see them under
the glint and glimmer of the Sapphire. Or so they thought.

The fourth day was when Skjorl saw the vultures. Shouldn’t have been out of cover, but he was bored with listening to Jasaan snore and in desperate need of a piss. Came out all careful,
but there wasn’t a sign of anything in the sky until he looked to the south and saw specks. First thought was dragons because that’s what the first thought always was, but he could see
right away he was wrong about that. Half a dozen specks, maybe more, and they were circling, which dragons never did. Dragon saw something it wanted, it went right down and helped itself. Either
that or it flew on about its business. Maybe swooped down for a closer look, but never circled.

Vultures then.

Took another two nights of walking to find what the vultures had been eyeing from up in the sky. Hard to be sure, on account of there not being too much left, but there couldn’t be much
doubt in the end. Erak, who’d had his arm bitten off by a snapper. Snappers had died, been eaten, been buried under rocks to keep them out of sight, but something had found them and something
had found Erak too. Hauled his fish-pecked corpse up out of the water and scattered its shreds all about.

‘Dragon.’

Jasaan shrugged. Skjorl didn’t think much about it either. Dragon had dug him up out of the water, or else maybe a snapper – so what? They walked on past the bones, and it was only
later, when they were settling in to rest up for the day, that Skjorl had got to wondering; and that was when he remembered the vultures.

‘Dragon dug him out of the water two days ago,’ he said.

Jasaan shook his head, but only until Skjorl told him about what he’d seen. Neither of them had much to say, but thinking on it set Skjorl on edge. Dragon had been here just a couple of
days ago, down on the ground, rooting and nosing about. Had to ask yourself why a dragon would be doing that.

They saw it again that evening, flying back towards Bloodsalt. Low over the valley, head sweeping from side to side. Searching.

‘It’s still looking for us,’ said Jasaan. Skjorl frowned. Couldn’t be right, because that wasn’t what dragons did, but if he took a moment to forget about all that
and just
looked
, he’d have to say the same.

It took another week and, seeing the dragon come prowling right past where they were hiding before, there couldn’t be any doubt. Dragon on the ground, sniffing its way up the Sapphire
valley, lifting boulders and peering into caves? Skjorl had never heard of anything like that, but maybe that was because no one had found a pair of dragons with so many eggs and then done what
he’d done. He gave himself a day to see if he could think of some way how two Adamantine Men might make a trap for it and kill it. Wasn’t surprised when he got nowhere with that, and so
on the next night they changed their course and struck away from the valley, up towards the moors, still close enough to Bloodsalt that the slopes were gentle and not yet the boulder-strewn cliffs
they’d start to be fifty miles further up the valley.

If you had to look back, Skjorl thought later, that was where their real falling-out had begun. Not that either said a word – too busy with pushing themselves onward – but once they
got up on the moors even Skjorl could see it had been a mistake, and there was the look in Jasaan’s eye like he knew that too. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the moors. Maybe that was
just when they’d both given up pretending any more. Jasaan, who’d never quite got over what happened in Scarsdale, and Skjorl, who simply couldn’t stop thinking that it should
have been Jasaan who’d died in the cisterns under Bloodsalt and Vish who should have been alive and walking back to the Purple Spur.

Three dragons in three days up on the moors and they both knew they should have stuck to taking their chances in the Sapphire valley. Didn’t use to be dragons up on the Oordish Moors. No
eyries. Hadn’t ever been that many snappers either, so Skjorl had reckoned on it being a safe enough place. Now he knew better. No food in the desert, but plenty of it up around
Yinazhin’s Way. Plenty of dragons too now, all busy eating it.

‘Every dragon that eyried in Bloodsalt must have come up here,’ said Jasaan. ‘Back in Hyram’s time that used to be more than two hundred.’ They were hiding in a
hollow, surrounded by rocks and long grass. They weren’t the only things hiding there. Jasaan had already been spat at by a snake.

‘Except the one in the Sapphire valley hunting for us.’

‘The
one
.’

‘
Hunting
for
us
.’

‘We should go back.’ And Skjorl knew he was right and they should, but there was some little demon in him that couldn’t quite ever let Jasaan be right and him be wrong. Maybe
because if it happened once then maybe Jasaan was right about some other things too.

‘You do that then.’

‘We’re stronger together.’

‘Your foot’s good enough. We can both stand alone if we have to.’

Made sense to go back into the valley. There was water. Walk at night, hide in the day and they’d be fine, dragon or no dragon. They’d be back in Samir’s Crossing in a month.
Trouble was, Skjorl was sick of it. Sick of everything. Sick of running and hiding. Sick of never seeing the sun, of sleeping every day in a cave, sick of dragons, sick of being too hot or too cold
or too wet, and sick of not being able to do the slightest thing about any of it. But most of all he was sick of Jasaan. Spineless, moaning Jasaan. And that, at last, was something he could
change.

‘Adamantine Men fight together. We stand together. That’s what we do.’

Skjorl nodded. ‘Right up until we’re a little bit hurt and instead of standing together we cry like babies and plead for help and let our comrades get killed when we should have been
fighting, eh?’

‘What?’

‘You.’

‘What are you talking about.’

‘Vish. Vish died because of you. Because you were too scared to do what you should have done.’ He saw Jasaan’s eyes burn then, but there was no going back. ‘I should have
left you in the cistern. I should have left you by the banks of the Sapphire. That’s what I should have done, and you should have told me to do it.’

‘I couldn’t walk, Skjorl!’ Yes, there was anger there all right and plenty of it. ‘Were there enemies I stopped you from killing?’

‘You should have stayed up fighting. You should have clawed your way up the rubble down there and stabbed that dragon in the eye yourself. That’s what a real Adamantine Man would
have done. But you didn’t, and so Vish did it instead, and now he’s dead and that’s on you.’

There might have been blows. It said everything about Jasaan, everything that Skjorl was sick of, that there weren’t. ‘You, of all people, have nothing to tell me about
murder,’ he hissed. ‘You’re a filthy animal. You’re sick.’

That was Scarsdale coming out, which was enough to make Skjorl’s hand on his sword stay where it was. And so neither of them drew their steel, and for a second or two they stared and let
each know the true depths of how much they despised the other; and then Jasaan spat at Skjorl’s feet and turned and walked away and that was the end of that.

There might have been some guilt. Might even have been some regret. Might have been that Skjorl wondered at his own words in the days after they went their separate ways. A man who’d been
a part of his company for more than a year. Whatever they’d fought, they’d fought together, him and Vish and Jex and the rest of the dead. They’d survived Sand together,
they’d survived the Blackwind Dales. They’d fought snappers and feral men. They’d reached the Silver River together and never mind what had happened at Scarsdale in between.
They’d lived on musty water and mushrooms and the flesh of dead men in the caves under the Purple Spur. They’d forayed and foraged in the City of Dragons, hiding in cellars in the day
and only coming out at night.

Might have stopped to wonder if maybe Jasaan had grown sick of all the same things he had, just a little sooner. Might have. But walking across the desolation of Yinazhin’s Way alone took
a hardness, and it was easier to let the hate burn instead of asking whether it was wrong. Guilt? An Adamantine Man had no use for that. So he walked on alone. Should have left Jasaan to die.
Should have let the dragon have him. Could have been back in the Purple Spur by now. Thoughts like that kept him alive when dragons burned the hills around him, when he cowered in caves or among
stones or sometimes simply huddled out in the open, praying to gods that didn’t exist while lightning rattled the skies, when he dreamed of warm soft bread and warm soft women and cursed
Jasaan for taking them away from him.

Yinazhin’s Way. He’d seen a map once which showed it all around the edge of the moors in a great arc from Bloodsalt to Bazim Crag. Someone had told him that you could see
Samir’s Crossing and the Sapphire valley from the path. Without anything else to go by, he went on, walking the road at night, sheltered away from it in the days. When the road touched the
edge of the cliffs and he looked out over the Hungry Mountain Plain and saw in the distance the glitter of a river and the black smudge of charred earth that had once been a town, he began to climb
down. The cliffs weren’t even cliffs here, easier than he’d expected, more a steep scrabbling scree of loose stones and boulders. Plenty of shelter from dragons.

He had to stop a mile or so away from the edge of what had once been Samir’s Crossing. Stop and take a moment to get himself together. Adamantine Men took what life brought, whatever that
was. They took their pleasures as it suited them when pleasures were there to be had. They didn’t shirk their load or complain or falter when they were set to work. If the weight of their
burden crushed them, then so be it, they got crushed, but they kept going to the end, staggering onwards, never putting it down. Adamantine Men didn’t weep at the thought that there would
finally be rest at the end of the night, and water and perhaps a few strips of dried meat and stale bread and most of all the company of their fellow men after so long alone in the wilderness. So
since Adamantine Men did none of those things, Skjorl took a few moments to be something else where no one would know, and only when he’d done with that did he walk on. Samir’s Crossing
was ash, but there were cellars there, places where others kept watch on the movements of the dragons near the Spur. From Samir’s Crossing there were tunnels to the Spur itself and what
passed for home.

He wrinkled his eyes, trying to see if he could see the Spur in the distance, but it was dark. He didn’t remember seeing it in the day. Couldn’t remember when the Spur had faded out
of sight after they’d left it all those months ago. After Samir’s Crossing and before the Sapphire valley turned north and butted against the cliffs of the moors. Somewhen in between.
Which meant this wasn’t right, and he wasn’t coming up on Samir’s Crossing after all.